Follow up to this post
ICYMI
On last week’s episode of The White Lotus, Jason Isaacs’ character got high and flashed his family with the family jewels. Two of the actors playing his kids confirmed that it was a prosthetic. Sarah Catherine Hook (Piper) said, “He was very excited to do it. I think he took pride in the prosthetic.” Sam Nivola (Lochlan) said, “He’s like, ‘It’s my fake dick scene today!’”
Apparently between Sunday night when the episode aired and later in the week when he did an interview with Gayle King, he got tired of talking about it and said: “The best actress this year is Mikey Madison at the Oscars and I don’t see anyone discussing her vulva, which is on television all the time and I’m not talking about Swedish cars. I think it’s interesting that there’s a double standard for men, but when women are naked, Margaret Qualley in The Substance, no one would dream of talking to her about her genitalia or her nipples or any of those things. So, it’s odd that there’s a double standard. I genuinely think it would be odd when there are characters — and some of the women are naked in here — it’d be odd if you were sitting here. And you would never dream of discussing their genitalia, not for a second.”
Due to the backlash from his ill-informed, obtuse, and incorrect comments (again, I would like to point out that Mikey Madison’s vulva was not shown AT ALL in Anora, let alone “all the time” as he claimed), he has issued a statement apologizing for saying that women aren’t asked about nudity. He then goes on to say that he’s never seen it happen.
“The internet was having fun with whether I was wearing a prosthetic in my nude scene and so was I, but I wanted to avoid that being the only thing that I was ever asked about in connection with Mike’s brilliant series, as it has been with other actors, so I thought maybe I just would just bat away the question with a joke if it came up. If it came up?! When so many people were insistent, it seemed weird and inappropriate that what they were actually insisting on was that they and the public really needed to know whether they’d actually seen my real penis or not. So bizarre.
It came out wrong, and I was tired — I’d done so many interviews. I absolutely should not have mentioned those two actresses, whom I respect enormously. Mikey Madison I’m a massive fan of. My point wasn’t that men have had a harder time than women — that would be absurd. Women have had a monstrous time on camera forever, and I hope to God that is changing.
The point I then wanted to make, but made badly, is that women have been exploited and exposed and treated wildly inappropriately on and off screen forever and, even then, I’d never witnessed any woman being grilled so specifically about their genitalia. I shouldn’t have invoked any actresses or used the phrase ‘double standard,’ which was just poor phrasing — there has long been a double standard around nudity on film and it’s not men who’ve suffered from it — in fact it’s something White Lotus has been correcting! Somehow it either came out wrong or was misinterpreted. Either way, I’d say to anyone still bothered…please just enjoy the show — literally none of it’s real and there’s bigger and better shocks coming!”
